SQL Reporting Services and SharePoint 2007 Broken by Windows Updates

Heres a nasty little problem, we have a SharePoint farm that
consists of 4 servers, two Web Front Ends, and application server and a SQL
server.

This is Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Enterprise SP2 running on
Microsoft Windows 2003 R2 SP2 (32-bit), all was well until a recent automatic
update was installed which broke the application server.

The application server hosted the “SharePoint Central
Administration Website” and also SQL Reporting Services 2008 that was linked
into the SharePoint farm.

PROBLEM(S)

The following morning after the update the Central
Administration Website started to show the following error: “Cannot connect to
the configuration database.”

A reboot of all the farm servers and tried again, still no
joy, I could not access the “Central Administration Website” running on the
application server.

It’s worth noting however the web front ends were unaffected
and happily connected to the databases, and our main SharePoint site collection
was accessible and worked fine. To make things more confusing the backup “Central
Administration Website” that ran on one of the web front end servers also
worked fine, but this showed that the configuration database was not corrupted
which was something.

Another of the problems caused was that the SQL Reporting services
server was dead too, it complained it could not access the database with the
following errors (in the event log) when starting up:

Something that many posts on the Internet advised was to
re-run the “SharePoint products and Technologies Configuration Wizard” to try
to fix SharePoints issues. There was also talk of running the psconfig command
to reinstall SharePoint on the server. However both methods resulted in the
same error message as shown below:

But
the above string: “System.Data.Common.DbConnectionOptions” turned out to be the
key to it, this is a component of .net framework and is used by both SQL
Reporting Services and SharePoint, this was failing therefore neither application
could contact the SQL server databases.

CAUSE and SOLUTION

It turns out that when we looked through the list of all the
updates installed and checked the event logs there were a list of about 10
updates that got applied, however, the two specific ones were those related to
Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2.

KB2656352

KB2633880

Removing these two updates and rebooting of all
the farm servers resolved the issues we were seeing and the “SharePoint Central
Administration WebSite” and SQL Reporting services started to work again as
expected.

I also tried to reinstall
the SQL Client using the sqlncli.msi installer pack, as it appeared to be
missing, in my case it was located here, I just ran this to ensure SQL client
was installed correctly.